On any given work day in Detroit, I’ll wake up at around 8 a.m. and go through a typical morning routine involving breakfast and hygiene. At approximately 8:45, 6 of us (Shelby, Divya, Chris, Ben, Liza, and I) will hop on our bikes and head towards the Fisher building, a mile ride to our respective offices. Liza and I will grab a cup of coffee and either head to our corner seats in the office or upstairs to the DTX Launch Detroit space on the second floor on Tuesdays and Fridays.
On Tuesdays we hear the groups pitch and hear criticism, then have a lecture on a certain aspect of building a startup. The curriculum ends at around 1 p.m. and if we don’t have any interviews scheduled we will grab lunch and finish the day downstairs. On Fridays, we sit in on speaker sessions from Detroiters working in various capacities, like in venture capital or accounting. After the morning session we try to get some interviews done with the teams, then head out for lunch and our weekly enrichment. On every other day, we’ll work together on our projects and often meet the Next Energy and Detroit Future City interns for lunch at New Center Park.
At around 4:30 we’ll bike back home and if we don’t have a group dinner or enrichment activity, I’ll either head to the gym or cook dinner for myself. After finishing our respective routines, the boys gather together for the event of the night: Settlers of Catan, a wildly popular board game that has been published in 30 different languages since its 1995 inception from German game-master Klaus Teuber. The game has become a nightly obsession among the boys’ apartment and although it sometimes strains relationships, coming together to play an intensely fun game truly forges an everlasting brotherhood that we will continue when we return to Duke.